Who, Why, What?
by disgustenin
Summary: Who is Darrell meant to be, why is Shannon the way she is, and what is Raymond's real identity? Read to find out the answers to those questions, and maybe a few more you never knew you had. / Rated M for violence.
1. Darrell

Who, Why, What?

"Who was he meant to be?"

That was the question on Darrell's hivemind that night, the question that he had avoided thinking about for so long. In some ways he wished he'd been programmed not to ponder these things because it made him feel like dying- not that that would do any good, he was immortal through the factory that he'd been made in, the one that he now controlled.

The endless cycle of death and rebirth was mind-breaking. He didn't need sleep, he didn't need to recharge; when a body died a new one was automatically activated with no pause in between. That meant there was no rest for the him at any moment. Either way, he had work to do.

He always had work to do. That was an undeniable truth. Constant work in the factory, monitoring and keeping the production line active with his hyper-fast brain, and out fighting with his siblings at times too. He didn't know a second that didn't exist while experiencing constant sensory overload.

His brain had been made to withstand it, though. His father, though idiotic at times, was undeniably a genius. Every part of him was thought out so thoroughly that glitches were nearly unheard of, save for ones caused by outside damage, which he wasn't built to process.

He knew why he was so fragile. He was weak fundamentally, so why try? It made him cheaper to make, and he'd break either way in the end. Mass production was the only way to keep the company's head above water. That meant that his value was on the same level as that of a smartphone despite his sentience.

Organics had lives worth living. Robots didn't. They were built, and for a purpose. His was labour. It would have been so easy for his father to just design machines without brains to assemble products and do work, but he chose to go one step beyond and give them the capability of thought. But why? And why the mind of a teenager?

Darrell had been gifted with eternal youth from his father. Eternal youth, eternal energy, eternal angst. He was programmed to feel raging hormones, and he was programmed to resist and fight back and think too hard on things. Programmed to act like an adolescent child, not quite naive but not quite intelligent.

A bitter smile crossed over his face like the reflection of a streetlight on the hood of a car, driving along a deserted road at midnight. It was gone as soon as it came. He knew how sick it was. He would never be able be able to meet his full potential, he just wasn't made for it, and though he was able to, his brain wasn't made to think about subjects like these. He felt himself glitch. His inner workings stopped for a split second, and then jolted back to life. His touch, sight, and hearing had been gone, but his brain had continued on. It was meant to punish him, to keep him from thinking these thoughts. He knew that. It had felt like an eternity of darkness, beautiful and calm.

He thought more.

What had his father wanted when he made him and his siblings? There were no mistakes in any of their systems, every part of him was made with the utmost care and attention to detail.

Glitch. 

His systems stopped again, and he tasted death, cut off from the rest of his mind, an individual for the first time in his unlife. He breathed it in, only to return to consciousness a moment too soon. He craved sleep, anything to release him from this.

His systems corrected himself, and he restarted to continue his thought process.

Their personalities were crafted so- no, not lovingly, though that was the word he would have liked to use- so thoroughly. He felt alive, like a fully-realized person, but he wasn't treated like one. His father had created a child that couldn't help but think of him as his father- no doubt just to give him a reason to be loyal to him, Darrell added as an extra note- but didn't treat him like his child but as a worker, a mindless, mass produced slave-machine.

He glitched once more, this time spasming in place. A rush of instant darkness fell over him for a wonderful second.

Reboot.

Darrell was made to work. An undeniable fact. He was only made to work. His brain was made for working. His flimsy cheap body was made for working. His personality fit only a worker.

Glitch. Darkness. Reboot.

Why did he feel so angry? So robbed and so helpless? Was it because of the feeling of the rest of his mind still working, still concentrating on its labour? What was this pain, physical and mental that wracked his body as he convulsed in place, willing his mind to shut down?

Glitch. Darkness. Reboot.

Why had he been given emotions? Why could he feel pain?

Glitch. Darkness. Reboot.

Why had he been given not only such horrifying life, but the capacity to think about it?

Glitch. Darkness. Reboot.

Who was he meant to be?

Glitch. Darkness.

Boot up.

Time to go to work.


	2. Shannon

Chapter 2

"Why was she like this?"

A simple question that Shannon had found difficult to answer. She was annoying, and she knew it. She owned it, too, but she couldn't help but wish that her personality wasn't the way it was. She couldn't fix it, it was just the way she was programmed. A snotty, annoying valley girl type, who _should_ be lounging around the mall surrounded with friends, not helping to manage a factory. Her ego was too inflated for her to be any other way but there was a disconnect between her attitude and her surroundings.

There was absolutely no reason for her to act the way she did, self-centered and smug all the time. Now that she thought about it, that was the only way she'd ever felt. She frowned quietly to herself. It was a strange concept ,that every feeling she'd ever had was watered down with her own egotistical perspective, even when she had no right to think that way.

She'd never had any friends, either, other than her siblings- though, could she even call them friends?- so it didn't make sense for her to act like she was such a diamond in the rough, such a blessing unto the earth. The one time she'd ever felt a purely positive emotion had been when she had been hit by lightning and glitched, and was suddenly enamoured with Radicles, the alien boy from the Bodega.

Though, something about that so called "glitch" had always rubbed her the wrong way, for a reason she didn't understand. Now, her eyes were opened to the crushing reality that she couldn't have been able to feel that way, or ever feel at all, because feelings in organics were caused by chemical reactions and robots didn't have the anatomy or chemicals to even begin to create true emotion-

Shannon gasped as the realization hit her. It had been no simple glitch, she now understood. She had been programmed for that to happen, and the lightning strike was just an easy excuse. The light on her chest had changed too, from its usual green to a passionate red, indicative of the fact that it wasn't just a systems error or damage caused by a jolt of electricity, but a way to seduce the alien boy into giving her- or her father- information.

That also explained why her default setting was a young, curvaceous woman. Ironically, her hips lied to everyone but herself. Her body was a weapon in more ways than one, because organics were so quick to lust over anything that looked like it could bear a child.

She wrapped her arms around her body as she looked in the full body mirror in her room. Her proportions were ridiculous, suited only to models. She looked at herself with a different eye now. She touched her face, then ran a cold hand over her chromed, shining curves. Turned to one side, then the other. She turned away from her reflection to sit on her bed, and held her head in her hands, wishing that it was possible to cry. Her body wasn't made for her, but for other people to look at, to be entranced by as she cut them to shreds with her shining blades. She understood now, the true evil of her father. To create life not out of instinct or for want of child but as workers, spies, and soldiers? The extent of his lack of morals was apparent to her in this moment, and she looked back on the times that she looked up to him, was truly loyal to him because it was the only way she knew how to be. Now, as she brought herself back to the present she couldn't help but feel utterly violated. Her mind and body were not her own, but created for the benefit of someone else.

Glitch.

She drifted through blackness for a split second, feeling nothing. It calmed her to her core.

Reboot.

She gasped electronically as she returned to consciousness and when she looked down at her hands they were trembling. Her fans were on full blast, causing her to vibrate as she heated up, systems overloading with anticipation for an attack, but none came. She was shaken. The only time this had happened before was when she had taken a particularly hard blow on the battlefield.

But this time it had been almost nice. Her thoughts had caused her to spiral, to enter a panic mode that made her reboot and the reboot settled her. She was already calm now but she wanted to feel that inky blackness again. From the last time it had happened she knew that the way to cause another systems reboot was to cause her to overheat, through the threat of further trauma.

She wrenched the leg off her desk and held it in her hands so tightly it dented, and she marvelled at her own strength. Quickly, she smashed the camera in her room that watched her and then she sat down cross legged on the floor. She looked at the makeshift bludgeon in her perfectly deadly metal hands. She extended one of her legs and examined it shortly, then deftly brought the metal desk leg down on it, cracking her glittering metal skin and crushing the cheap machinery inside. A dark liquid seeped out, pooling on the floor under her, and a red symbol appeared in her vision indicating that she had taken damage. She ignored it, looking at the destruction she had brought to the formerly too-perfect body she had been given. It made her happy to see that she had a choice in how she looked for once in her life. She couldn't move that leg anymore.

Glitch.

Crushing, comforting darkness surrounded her once more, holding her like a fetus in the warm womb of a mother. She didn't feel, didn't think, didn't exist.

Reboot.

As she was thrust into the blinding light of reality she brought her club down on her other leg, harder this time. A resounding _crack_ greeted her and when she removed her weapon her other leg had been completely snapped in half. Oil poured out from the stump and she lost her balance, falling over onto her back and hitting the hard floor, cracking the linoleum and showing the concrete under.

Glitch. Darkness. Reboot.

This was getting repetitive. She needed it to end. She turned her head to the side to grab onto her club to perform the final blow and found herself face to face with her reflection again. It seemed that an oil containment vessel had burst inside her body from the trauma, causing the toxic, greasy liquid to drain out of the cracks in her visor giving her the appearance of crying. As her vision blurred, she grabbed her weapon and brought it, whistling up to her face to end her misery. She was at peace, finally content for one millionth of a second before her head exploded from the force of the bludgeon smashing her beautiful, anatomically perfect face to splinters. Artificial brains spattered on the wall behind her, and the floor. The body sparked.

Reboot.

Raymond found her discarded corpse.


	3. Raymond

"What's his real identity?"

Raymond had been doing some thinking, and came to the conclusion that his personality was a mess. Sports or romance? Health or love? Two basic things that he could have been based around easily but he got both. The two things had nothing in common, yet he was some amalgamation of the two. He couldn't imagine ever being anything else, though, because if he didn't have those two fundamental things he wouldn't be himself.

At that point he could have fixed his hair, strode out of his room and started the day, and forgot that this train of thought ever occurred to him- but something stopped him. He looked deeper into the mirror, at himself but specifically his eyes. Beautiful, delicate, and oh so artificial. The iris widened slightly as he gazed into the mirror, embarrassed that he was so preoccupied with his own reflection but intrigued by the intricacy of his design.

He turned his head and watched as light dripped off of his long nose, how shadows did not exist on his sparkling skin. Why was he so narcissistic? The thought caught him off guard but he decided to humor it. Both of his main themes were things that could only be effectively enjoyed with a healthy amount of self confidence but his seemed… too high.

Raymond tore himself away from the mirror and began to pace, his heels tapping on the floor. One, two, three, turn. One, two, three, turn. He fell into a rhythm and so did his thoughts. He already knew that he was too self-assured but it didn't bother him. What bothered him was that he had already filled what he was expected to be, and he might not ever be able to grow to be anything else. Was he born into the world without potential? Was he meant to be only who his father told him he was?

Absentmindedly, he walked out the door and let it swing shut behind him. His rhythm of one, two, three, turn, transformed into a rhythm of tip, tap, tip, tap on the hard concrete floor of the hallway. He didn't know where he was walking, but that was alright. He didn't have anything to do anyways.

He was glad he didn't have anything to do, unlike his siblings who were expected to be working at any given moment. He was a fighting robot, made to be mean and green and sharp and slick, fast-talking and fast-moving and deadly. His unlife was cushy compared to Darrell's, and Shannon, well, he was just glad he didn't end up in her boat. Spying was never his forte.

He made his way down to the main lounge to see if any of his siblings were there. He needed something to get his mind off these thoughts and as good as he was at basketball sometimes games with himself got too predictable. When he arrived at the lounge he poked his head in and saw nobody, so he left and walked down the corridor towards Shannon's room to see if he could get any company.

His thoughts began to spiral again on the long, slow walk down the hallways and stairs, and the lower he got into the facility, the lower his mood got. He was bored, to say the least, and with the feeling of other parts of himself sending vision to the database that meant a lot. Usually, he never got bored. Some part of him was always doing something interesting, and if there was at least one he was entertained.

He decided to get his mind in order so he could tackle his problems one by one. First, he was confused about his identity, two, it made him feel bad that he was so narcissistic, and three, he felt like he wasn't worth anything because his life had no meaning to anyone but the people buying and selling him and then it was only for money.

 _Tip, tap, tip, tap, shudder, shudder, shudder_ , went the metal mesh staircase as he stepped down it gracefully. It shook and wobbled but it was stable. There were small lights on the wall, to the side, lighting up the long hallway leading down to Shannon's room.

He was the most mentally stable of his siblings, Raymond knew that for sure. Since Darrell had kicked their father out they had begun to understand themselves better, and this was one thing that he had noticed about himself. His temper didn't go off as easily as Shannon or Darrell's, and his self confidence was much higher. He appreciated where he was at mentally but knew it could be better.

His thoughts turned and twisted into knots and pretzels as he let his mind wander, but the topic rested on himself. He was confused and it bothered him but not enough for him to take any actions to fix himself, because it just didn't seem like it was important enough. He was getting by, and that was enough for him.

Suddenly, a loud _crack!_ Echoed through the hallway, and Raymond, curiosity piqued, walked faster towards the source of the noise. Another noise, this time more of a _crash!_ Reached him, closer this time, and as he walked it dawned on him that it must be coming from Shannon's room.

He skidded around a corner, running now towards the doorway, ready to pick on his sister for whatever problem she had caused this time when he reached it but something made him first slow down, then completely stop. He had stepped in a greasy, black liquid that seemed to be oozing out from under the door.

"Eugh." he whispered, and stepped away from it, scraping his foot on the floor behind him, then leaning forward to open the door without getting his feet dirty with whatever this was. He stepped on a dry patch of ground and then stepped into the room to be greeted with a shocking sight.

A shannon lay mangled on the floor, the same black liquid that he now identified as oil seeping out from its many injuries of which the most extreme were solid cracks to both legs and the head. His immediate thoughts were intruders, but the alarm hadn't been activated so that couldn't have been the case. He noticed that one steaming arm was still holding a disembodied leg of her desk in a death grip, denting the metal in the shape of a fist. the thing that repulsed him the most, though, was the way that the face had been smashed in. the visor was broken, and everything from her forehead to her chin was sunken in.

Raymond took one step back, then another, this time not minding or seeing the growing puddle of black oil coming from the disfigured corpse of his sister. He slowly wrapped his arms around his waist for stability and comfort, leaning against the wall to make sure he didn't fall. It didn't make sense. How could this have happened?

What could have caused this?


	4. Introspection and Explanations

Darrell looked through the surveillance tape again, up until the point that the camera was smashed, then switched the view to the lounge where a new Shannon stepped out of the machine. She walked out the door and he didn't switch the camera view again, he already knew that she was going to one of the other lounges. He had followed her the first time he rewatched the tapes but on what must have been the sixth time, there was no reason to. It was beside the point, anyways. What was important were the events leading up to her deactivation.

He turned off the computer and leaned back in his chair, closing his eye. He crossed his arms in front of him whirred his fans pensively, in what might have been a sigh if he were human. Shannon had laid on her bed, looked at herself in the mirror, sat back down, and then wrenched the leg off her desk and smashed the camera, and then obviously deactivated herself.

Why had she cut off his surveillance to her room before doing it, though? And why had she done it in such an inefficient way?

He turned his computer back on to watch it over again, though what he was hoping to accomplish he didn't know- but before he could repeat his actions for the umpteenth time, he saw a flash of green movement on the screen of the camera outside Shannon's room. He squinted and leaned towards the image, straining to get the most information out of the image. Raymond was walking into the room, pausing for a moment to do something Darrell couldn't make out; the camera wasn't at all high-definition, and the hallway was dimly-lit. Raymond stayed in the room for what must have been- what, fifteen seconds?- and then walked back out, practically jogging back down the hallway.

Darrell's mind spun. What had Raymond seen in Shannon's room that caused him to make such a quick exit? He wasn't a squeamish robot. Seeing a discarded shell of one of his siblings wasn't enough to make him uneasy, so whatever was in there had to have been out of the ordinary. He wondered for a moment, then went over the possible ways he could go from here. He could call Shannon or Raymond up to his office and force them to confess what had happened- but that could cause unnecessary tension between the three of them that could impair teamwork.

The next thing he could do is go down there himself and get directly into the fray, which would be the most efficient way of going about it, but… he didn't want it to have to come to that. He didn't want to be involved with everybody's business- personally involved, he meant. Despite his position as boss of all of boxmore he was averse to actually taking charge in these sorts of situations, especially since his employees were his siblings.

Another artificial, wheezing, sigh was expelled from him, and it cooled him down. It was times like this he wished that he had the ability to breathe, something he had read that organics could use not only to keep themselves alive, but to refresh themselves by inhaling deeply, and then exhaling. It was usually accompanied by a closing of the eyes and a clearing of the mind- that part of the exercise Darrell could manage. He laid back in his chair and heard it let out a low _cr-rr-ee-ak_ from a movement it was unaccustomed to, and Darrell closed his eyes with an audible _click_.

He reset his shoulders to their resting position from their usually hunched posture and sensed the line of code that had been keeping them in place end abruptly, releasing a distraction, a lag from the back of his mind. Then, he unfurrowed his brow. He wasn't surprised that he was showing so many signs of stress, what with his internal monologue taking such an unfortunate turn the other night, breaching the subject of his mortality- or lack thereof. It was tiring enough for him to turn to a slow suicide in the place of an easy reset by pressing the button on his chest. He had been so worn out that night, so strained…

Darrell's cycloptic eye snapped open suddenly, and he sat up straight in the cushy office chair that he couldn't feel. _Eureka!_ was what he might have said if he were an even bigger dork- but his numerous insecurities aside, it was obvious! His problem was that he was overworked, and he would believe it if Shannon, Raymond, or even Ernesto told him that they were, too.

But what was the difference between now and then, before their father had left? The rate of work was the same, and they had always been able to handle that…-except, now their father was gone. That was a sort of mental strain in itself, Darrell supposed. Dealing with the absence of somebody subconsciously- yes, that could cause a significant amount of mental strain, he decided,

His employees- his family- needed time to adjust to this. It was a huge change, no more yelling, no more constant verbal beatdowns and nonsensical raging like they had all expected on a daily basis for all their life. They had been held down for so long, and now they were given the space to grow. The company, too, had been given space to grow outside of the petty confines of his father's grudge against the plaza that had now turned into a family hobby.

They were in a period of self-examination, experimentation. That was why Darrell had felt so overwhelmed, and why Shannon had done what she did. The boxmore bots were all in various stages of adolescence, and quickly growing. They were becoming even more aware of their own minds, something that brought freedom- and responsibility.

Darrell leaned over his desk and rested his head on his hands. His mind was spinning with thoughts- this time not only introspection, but explanation. Everything was finally falling together, and soon he would take action to help his family and himself. Morale would be at an all-time high, and by effect so would company efficiency.

That was the reason that Darrell gave himself for his newfound protective compassion towards his siblings, and confidence in himself. It was logical, unattached, and simple, just like how he believed he was supposed to be, just like his father had never been- but nothing was ever logical, unattached, or simple with teenage boys. So, something at the back of Darrell's mind seeded and began to grow, fertilized in contempt for himself and watered with resentment for his place in the world. Connections were made, and the process began.

All that mattered now was what direction the seed grew in.

* * *

A/N:

wow, this is my first authors note on this fanfiction and i just want to say thank you guys so much for your support! this fic is admittedly dinky rn but in this week alone ive already gotten around 300 views and 5 reviews! currently writing is just a hobby, and this is actually the first thing ive written seriously but everything that people have been saying has really encouraged me to keep this going. originally this fic was going to be 3 chapters long and i was shooting for just around 500 words each, but i've met my goal and doubled it and as you can see, im not leaving it at 3 chapters. im hoping that with this fic ill be able to give these characters the arcs they deserve, and that im hoping the show will give them.

anyways, im rambling. thanks to you guys this fic has been able to thrive and its made me really happy. thank you all so much!

p.s. if you guys have any ideas, fixes, theories, or just plain compliments id love to hear them so shoot me a review if you feel like it, i'd appreciate it a lot. from now on, i'm going to be answering reviews in the authors notes.

again, thank you guys so much, ily all!

\- phoenix


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